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Google has joined forces with a number of Asian telecoms giants to deploy the world’s fastest trans-Pacific submarine cable. The cable, which is lumbered with the rather unimaginative name “Faster”, will have an initial capacity of 60 terabits per second. Faster (it’s not even an acronym!) will provide an important high-speed link from the west coast of the US to landing points in Japan, and then on to rapidly growing markets in China, India, Indonesia, and other Asian countries. The cable will be deployed by NEC at a total cost of $300 million.

Police in the UK have become one of the first major police forces to deploy automated facial recognition technology to catch criminals. The British police will be using NEC’s NeoFace technology, which can match faces from crime scene photos or videos against a database of images in just a few seconds. Combined with the highest density of CCTV cameras of any country in the world, police body-worn cameras that are constantly recording, and a CSI-like smartphone and tablet app that allows for face and fingerprint matching in the field, it is rather hard to be a criminal in the UK nowadays.

NEC has broken the ultra-long haul internet speed record by transmitting 1.15 terabits per second with a single laser over a distance of 10,000km (6,213 miles). In total, four lasers were used simultaneously to transmit 4Tbps over a single optic fiber.